MANTZIARAS, P._Rudolf Schwarz and the concept of 'City-Landscape'

7/30/2019 MANTZIARAS, P._Rudolf Schwarz and the concept of 'City-Landscape'

1/22

RUDOLF SCHWARZ AND THE CONCEPT OF

CITY-LANDSCAPE

Panos Mantziaras

In the immediate post-war Germany, an extended discussion took place

within the urban planning milieu on the new form to be given to the devas-

tated cities in the process of their reconstruction1. Already lurking in the last

years of warfare, the debate revolved around the unique opportunity for a new

layout of the urban agglomerations. Indeed, from the rubble that covered every

major city sprang a wave of visions about a new city form.

Amongst such visions, those of the architect Rudolf Schwarz (1897-1961)

on the reconstruction of Cologne were expressed under the term Stadtland-

schaft: a low density urban environment, with human constructions and na-

ture merging together in a discontinuous, clustered and ordered manner,

integrating historical cores, new residential zones, industry and landscape into

a unified system structured by the transportation networks. The most appro-

priate translation for the term would be city-landscape as opposed to urban

landscape which generally refers to the image and qualities of the city 2, rather

than to the idea of mixing city and landscape into a new entity, as was the case

with Schwarz3. His vision, and the theoretical premises of his work appeared

Arquitectura, ciudad e ideologa antiurbana

1. For an overview of these events on the archi-tectural arena and its ideological stakes, cf.FRANK, Hartmut, The Late Victory of NeuesBauen. German Architecture after World War II,Rassegna, n. 54 ; 1993; for the urban planningdebate, cf. DURTH, Werner, GUTSCHOW, Niels,Trume in Trmmern, Planungen zum Wiederaufbau zerstrter Stdte im westenDeutschlands, 1940-1950, Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn,Braunschweig/Wiesbaden, 1988; DIEDENDORF,

Jeffry M., In the Wake of War: The Reconstructionof German Cities after World War II, OxfordUniversity Press, New York/Oxford, 1993; Krieg,Zerstrung, Aufbau, Schriftenreiher der Akademieder Knste, vol. 23, Henschel, Berlin, 1995. JosephLouis Nasr, Reconstructing or Constructing Cities?Stability and Change in Urban Form in Post-WorldWar II France and Germany, UMI DissertationInformation Service, 1997.2. It is interesting however to note the term urbanlandscape used by G. A. Jellicoe, in his bookMotopia: A Study in the Evolution of UrbanLandscape (Studio Books, London) in 1961, in hisdescription of an urban vision where generalisedautomobile use and the principle of green openspaces of geometry and biology resulted in anew kind of ordered urban devel-opment akin toLe Corbusiers project for Algiers. A few years laterGarrett Eckbo used the term for purposes of ren-dering natural elements in urban design (UrbanLandscape Design, McGraw-Hill, New York 1964).This approach corresponded to the employment

of the term made by J. D Hitchmough in UrbanLandscape Management (Inkata Press, Sydney,1994). More recently, Philip Waller edited TheEnglish Urban Landscape (Oxford University Press,New York, 2000), with a historical-analytical pers-pective, where the term coincides with that oftownscape [] an ideological as well as builtenvironment, carrying iconographic and mytho-logical significance [] a disputed terrain, foughtover from political, economic, and social causesand for metaphysical reasons (p. 11). This desig-nation underlies already the material of a collec-tive volume edited by Paul L. Knox in The RestlessUrban Landscape (Prentice Hall, EnglewoodCliffs(NJ)) in 1993, showing that the socio-cultu-ral and the aesthetic-pastoral dimensions of theterm overlapped for a certain period. The politicaldimension of the urban landscape is particularlyvisible in Brian Ladds The Ghosts of Berlin:Confronting German History in the UrbanLandscape (The University of Chicago Press,Chicago & London, 1997), where urban space isseen as the register of historical traits, raising the

Rudolf Schwarz, general plan of the citylandscape of Cologne, 1951.


2/22

in his book Von der Bebauung der Erde (1949), followed one year later by his

official rapport on the reconstruction plans, Das neue Kln (1950)4.

Rudolf Schwarz, a Klner himself, was heavily affected by the destruction

of such an important historical and cultural heritage and did not particularly

believe in the chance for a new start and a new morality5

:

There is this misleading word about the unique opportunity. That is, the destruction of the

city would give the opportunity to build at her place a better and more beautiful one. Purely

externally this is probably valid: in the most dreadful and crude way one of the noblest vessels

of occidental tradition has been smashed and ruined in four years of pitiless war. The devasta-

tion was wild and blind, it left a brutish field of rubble in the place of the old of Cologne with

its irreparable monuments of a millenary history and civilisation6.

The distance that he took from the technical and economical aspirations of

the new his colleagues at that time was escorted by a particularly sophisticated

argumentation ranging from topography to history and from ontology to socio-

logy and illustrated by an impressive arsenal of plans and schemes7. His main

target was, above all, to render to the historic city its cultural and symbolic pri-

macy, integrating it into a new economic universe. His project was not reali-

sed, despite its obvious strategic and spatial qualities. Produced under theimplacable dictates of urgency and speculation, it has been rapidly marginali-

zed and fallen into oblivion, not unlike his outstanding architectural work. It is

this last work that was mainly revived by means of publications and exhibitions

in the 1990s8, in which another modernism on the margins of the Modern

Movement is depicted. A modernism that cannot be categorised as radical,

since it was often expressed in terms of opposition and scepticism towards the

architectural avantgardes of the 1920s9. Indeed, Schwarz was one of those

skeptics who felt the difficulties of [the avantgardes] courageous and radical

realism, as Manfredo Tafuri remarked10; a skepticism that didnt fit within the

criteria elaborated by the post-war historiography that often depreciated the

architects of the innere Emigration (those who had remained in Germany

and put up or collaborated with the nazi regime, Rudolf Schwarz included)11.

The renewed interest in Schwarzs work eventually brings his urban plan-ning activity into light, but either in a succinct and factual way or in an apolo-

getic tone, seemingly trying to purge his figure from the equivocal signs that

especially his writings emitted in a Germany that still saw its past heavily cri-

ticised12. The architects ambivalent political stance13, which became particu-

larly evident in town planning, certainly didnt facilitate the task. At the same

time the dense theoretical construct upon which he was basing his design pro-

ducts limited the effort of the historians to find in his words and thoughts those

elements that would reintroduce him in the pantheon of the post-war moder-

nist architects and planners. But this effort, however noble might it be, had a

curious sideeffect: to oversee, that is, that exactly in the critical stance towards

the Neuzeit that Schwarz effectively adopted, there may elements that as

Tafuri put it regarding the opposition of prudenzia and novitas in the Venetian

Republic14 reverse conventional expectations; not only in the way problems

are treated, but also in the inventiveness and wit in the work on space and form.

This paper, focused on Schwarzs urban planning theory and practice, will

argue that his Stadtlandschaft was not only informed by the centenary town

planning tradition and the cultural stage set of a rapidly industrialising

Panos Mantziaras

16

question of their critical reconstruction. In theFrench context, publications like those on thework of Jean Claude Nicolas Forestier, Du jardinau paysage urbain (Picard, Paris, 1990), orient theterm towards the management of the greenmetropolitan areas and their integration into acomprehensive urban system. A similar view is tobe seen in the book by J. M. Loiseau, F. Terrasson

and Y. Trochel, Le paysage urbain (Sang de la terre,Paris, 1993), marks the connection and kinshipbetween the observation of the natural landscapeand that of the human realm, under the assump-tion that the landscape is the common place of anatural and of a social evolution. A very differentview is given by Franois Loyer in his Paris XIXesicle (Ateliers Parisiens dUrbanisme, 1982),where the urban scapes themselves, with or wit-hout greenery, are considered paysages urbains,thus lending the status of a quasinaturality in thetechnical urban formation. This is the way thatthe term Stadtlandschaft was used in German inthe past decades to designate the urban sceneand its topo-morphological evolutions, as it is tobe seen, for example, in Eckart Vancsas, DerKarlsplatz: Geschichte einer Stadtlandschaft, P.Zsolnay, Vienna, 1983.3. Cf. however also the term city-region as des-cribed and analysed in Robert E. Dickinson, City-Region and Regionalism: A GeographicalContribution to Human Ecology, Kegan Paul,

Trench, Trubner & Co. Ltd., London, 1947;Dickinson makes takes considerable notice of theGerman geographical and planning experience indescribing the city-region as a constellation, acluster of centres round the capital whoseinfluence is made evident in its environs by aradiating system of traffic routes, and, furtherafield, by isolated single strands running tosepa-rate towns, each of which in its turn is a localcentre of radiating routes through which it, ratherthan the metropolis, becomes the dominant cen-tre for local affairs(p. 18).4. Cf. SCHWARZ, Rudolf, Das Neue Kln, ein

Vorentwurf, in : Stadt Kln (dit.), Das neue Kln,Verlag J. P. Bachem, Cologne, 1950; the integrityof the material connected with Schwarzz townplanning activity is to be found in his privatearchives, in Cologne.5. Cf. FRANK, The Late Victory of Neues Bauen,loc. cit., p. 65.6. Das neue Kln, p. 62.7. As it is to be shown by the comparative reading

of his approach in Gottlob Binden (ed.),Grundfragen des Aufbaus in Stadt und Land,Minutes of the Conference on the Reconstruc-tion (Cologne 1947), Julius Hoffman Verlag,Stuttgart, 1947.8. The first effort to reconsider this work was atthe end of the 1970s, Ulrich Conrads and MariaSchwarz reedited Schwarzs earliest book,Wegweisung der Technik published in the late1920s, which had at that time been considered asimportant as Friedrich Dessauers Philosophie derTechnik and Oswald Spenglers Der Mensch unddie Technik in: Rudolf Schwarz, Wegweisung derTechnik und andere Schriften zum Neuen Bauen,1926-1961, Fr. Vieweg & Sohn,Braunschweig/Wiesbaden, 1979. This book wasfollowed by a concise inventory of Schwarzs workand thought, on the occasion of an exhibition inManfred Sundermann/Maria Schwarz (ed.),Rudolf Schwarz, Schriftenreihe der Akademie derArchitektenkammer Nordrhein-Westfalen und derDeutschen UNESCO-Komissionn, Band 17,Dsseldorf/Bonn, 1980. It is in the early 1990sthat the young theologian Walter Zahner with hisRudolf Schwarz-Baumeister der NeuenGemeinde, Ein beitrag zum Gesprch zwischenLiturgietheologie und Architektur in derLiturgischen Bewegung, Oros Verlag, Altenberge,1992, opened the way to more recent revivals


3/22

Germany; but that his views and tools on the city and its making anticipated

despite its anti-urban (grossstadtfeindlich) and cultural-pessimistic (kultur-

pessimistisch) elements15 alternative planning methodologies dealing with

the phenomenon of sprawl and attempting to contain and transform it into a

credible project.

RUDOLF SCHWARZ FROM ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN TO

URBAN PLANNING

Rudolf Schwarz was born in Strasbourg in 1897. He obtained his architec-tural degree at the Kniglich Technischen Hochschule Charlottenburg (Berlin),

in 1918. He continued his studies in Bonn and Cologne, where he also had

worked under Fritz Schumacher's for the extension plan of the city (1919-22),

before becoming Hans Poelzig's Meisterschler (1923-24). Around that time


17

that focused mainly on Schwarzs religious archi-tecture and the corresponding part of his wri-tings. Namely, Conrad Lienhardt (ed.), RudolfSchwarz (1897-1961), Werk-Theorie-Rezeption,Schnell & Steiner, Regensburg, 1997; WolfgangPehnt/Hilde Strohl, Rudolf Schwarz: Architekteiner anderen Moderne, Hatje, Ostfildern-Ruit,1997 (catalogue of the 1997 retrospective exhibi-tion in Cologne, Berlin Munich, Frankfurt and

Vienna); Thomas Hasler, Architektur als Ausdruck Rudolf Schwarz, gta Verlag/Gebr. Mann Verlag,Zrich/Berlin, 2000; Rudold Stegers, Rume derWandlung. Wnde und Wege: Studien zum Werkvon Rudolf Schwarz, Vieweg Verlag,Braunschweig/Wiesbaden, 2000. In the spring2000, an exhibition was organised at the BasilicaPalladiana, in Vicenza, entitled Lo spazio sacrodel 900. Architetture di Rudolf Schwarz e Hans

van der Laan.9. Cf. Barbara Miller Lanes seminal work,Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918-1945,Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA), 1968.10. Manfredo Tafuri, Theories and History ofArchitecture, Harper and Row, New York, 1980,First Chapter Modern Architecture and theEclipse of History.11. Cf. DURTH, Werner, Deutsche Architekten:Biographische Verflechtungen 1900-1970, Friedr.

Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig/Wiesbaden, 1986.12. It is interesting to note that the retrospectiveexhibition on Rudolf Schwarz opened under theheavy climate brought inGermany by the veryintense debate on Daniel Jonas Goldhagens,Hitlers Willing Executioners, (first edited by AlfredA. Knopf, New York, 1996), thus posing once morethe question of the breadth and depth of thenational-socialist political roots in the Germanculture.13. Baubolschevik for the national-socialistregime and simultaneously suspect for collabora-

tion with this same regime; cf. Hartmut Frank,Die Stadtlandschaft Diedenhofen, in : HartmutFrank / Jean-Louis Cohen (sous la dir. de), Les rela-tions franco-allemandes 1940-1950 et leurseffets sur l'architecture et la forme urbaine, rese-arch document, 1986, p. 282.14. Cf. TAFURI, Manfredo, Venice and theRennaissance, MIT Press, Cambridge/MA, 1989;Introduction.15. On the general cultural implication of thisattitude cf. Fritz Stern, The Politics of CulturalDespair : A Study in the Rise of the GermanicIdeology, University of California Press, Berkeley,1961; on the relation of this tendency concerningthe urban phenomenon, cf. Klaus Bergmann,Agrarromantik und Grostadtfeindschaft, VerlagAnton Hain, Meisenheim am Glan, 1970; cf. alsothe reactivation of Bergmanns assumption byWerner Durth, Stadtplanung 1930-1950:Zwischen Kontinuitt und Bruch, in: WernerDurth/Winfried Nerdinger, Architektur undStdtebau der 30er/40er Jahre, DeutschesNationalkomitee fr Denkmalschutz, Bonn, 1994,particularly pp. 34-37; cf. also Werner Durth/NielsGutschow, Trume in Trmmern, Planungen zumWiederaufbau zerstrter Stdte im westenDeutschlands, 1940-1950, Friedr. Vieweg & Sohn,Braunschweig/Wiesbaden, 1988, vol. I(Konzepte), pp. 207-219.

Rudolf Schwarz, photo in his studio, 1948.


4/22

he joined the Catholic Youth Quickborn and very quickly become collabora-

tor of the leading personality of the movement, Romano Guardini16. For the

period 1927-41, Scwharz was given the editorial responsibility of the move-

ments review Die Schildgenossen. In the following years, he was invited by

Dominikus Bhm to teach architectural composition at the

Kunstgewerbeschule in Offenbach, while collaborating with him in church

projects. Religious and community buildings became his main architectural

activity. Between 1927 and 1934 he was director at the Kunstgewerbeschule in

Aachen, joining simultaneously the Deutscher Werkbund. During this period

Schwarz was considered often despite his objection as representative of

the Neues Bauen17

. In the period 1934-41 he was freestanding architect inOffenbach and Frankfurtam-Main, undertaking mainly small private and paro-

chial architectural commissions. In 1941, and after repetitive efforts to gain

access to design commissions, he managed to find a position as responsible for

the reconstruction of cities at Lorraine18. This incident opened for him a period

of reflexion and activity on town planning, which was continued by his

appointment as Generalplaner in Cologne (1946-1952), a period that lasted

virtually until the end of his life19.

Apparently without previous experience in this field, Schwarz was given

the assignment to provide extension plans to the new order communities

(Neuordnungsgemeinden), that is villages that had suffered war damages at

the outbreak of the war. Close to his birthplace, a predominantly Catholic area,

the architect resumed to circular schemes, by placing houses like precious

stones on a ring. While exalting the communitarian ideal, he hoped to avoida false mystique of the community as he later confessed in Von der

Bebauung der Erde20. He thus reiterated the debate developed during the twen-

ties and thirties in the Quickborn, whose neoplatonic tendencies and ambi-

tions to counter the liberal industrial world with a new desire for the

Panos Mantziaras

18

16. GUARDINI, Romano, (Verona 1885-Munich1968), priest, theologist and professor in Phi-losophy of Religions in the University of Berlin,has been one of the most important figures of theCatholic movement in Germany, and source of

inspiration thanks to his teaching and writings.17. Cf. Haus der Jugend in Aachen, Die Form,year 4, October 1929, pp. 515-520; Die sozialeFrauenschule in Aachen, Die Form, year 6, n. 1,1931, pp. 11-22; Die Frohleichnam-skirche inAachen, Der Baumeister, 1932, pp. 27-41.Schwarz was a fervent opposer to the Bauhaus,and especially to Walter Gropius, whom he perso-nally attacked in a series of articles published inBaukunst und Werkform in 1953; causes, eventsand resonance are discussed by Ulrich Conrads inDie Bauhaus Debatte 1953, Fr. Vieweg & Sohn,Braunschweig/Wiesbaden, 1994.18. A first original research on this subject wasconducted by Jean-Louis Cohen and HartmutFrank, presented in the unpublished report Lesrelations franco-allemandes 1940-1950 et leurseffets sur l'architecture et la forme urbaine, 1985.For a brief rfrence to the subject cf. HartmutFrank, La Stadtlandschaft Diedenhofen(Thionville), Casabella, n. 567, April 1990, p. 56.19. In 1953, Rudolf Schwarz was offered the chairof Stdtebau and Kirchenbau at the Staat-licheKunstakademie in Dsseldorf, where he died in1961. For a historical overview of his urban plan-ning activity, cf. Wolfgang Pehnt, op. cit., pp. 100-125; for a short curriculum of the architecte cf.Rudolf Stegers, op. cit., pp. 180-181.20. Cf. Von der Bebauung der Erde, p. 82.

Rudolf Schwarz, Jugendhaus, Aachen1928.


5/22

community21 gave concrete ideological form to an ageold confrontation bet-

ween the essentially urban liberals and the Catholics who were mostly

rural. The project for the new villages was thus a first opportunity for Schwarz

to experiment in a different scale ideas he had already expressed in the late

1930s in his generally considered most influential work Vom Bau der

Kirche22. It is there that the Gestalt (the abstract spatial configuration) of a

communal reunion is examined in its ontological meaning, spatial properties

and symbolic values.

Schwarzs second assignment, immediately thereafter, was to produce an

extension plan for the city of Thionville, a mining city of around 70.000 inha-bitants expected to increase its population to 180.000. Contrary to initial pro-

posals for a continuous extension, Schwarz proposed a series of satellite

Siedlungen, scattered in the neighbouring valleys and the protection of the his-

torical core of the city with a new ring road and a first necklace of residen-

tial quarters beyond it. His overall concept is described in an unpublished

rapport, destined to the civil administration of Westmark, formed by the fusion

of the Saar to Lorraine.

The thirty doublepage text is entitled Stadtlandschaft Diedenhofen (after

the German name of Thionville) and constitutes the germ of Schwarzs later

planning theory, going beyond mere technical matters. The introduction of the

reader to an apocalyptic image of mines having destroyed the preindustrial har-

mony of the landscape, indicated his intention to consider the landscape in

close relation to the city.

The maelstrom of the ore, of the furnaces and of the rolling mills flowed down in the valleys,

like a volcanic eruption, gobbled up the old villages and the hamlets, left them behind it, in the

middle of the place, like foreign substances [] Thus, a dying land is today inhabited by a dying

German people23.


19

21. Cf. the words of Idelfons Herwegen, The indi-vidual that appeared through the Renaissanceand the Liberalism has lived his/her life. [Now] onedesires the community; Alos Baumgartner, DieAuswirkungen der liturgischen Bewegung aufKirche und Katholizismus, in : Anton Rauscher(ed.) Religis-kulturelle Bewegungen im deuts-chen Katholiismus seit 1800, FerdinandSchningh, Paderborn, 1986.22. SCHWARZ, Rudolf, Vom Bau der Kirche,Werkbundverlag, Wrzburg, 1938; the book waspublished in English under the title The ChurchIncarnate (Henry Regenery, Chicago) in 1957, witha preface by Mies van der Rohe.23. SCHWARZ, Rudolf, Stadtlandschaft Dieden-hofen (July 1943?), Schwarz Archives, Cologne,pp. 4-4a.

Rudolf Schwarz, Corpus Christi Church,Aachen, 1929-30.


6/22

The correspondence established between a deformed countryside and a

decayed social base implied that a reconstruction of the former would inevi-

tably mean revitalisation of the latter into a new framework of life,theHeimat. The term is laden with meaning and symbolism in the German

cultural space since the mid-19th century and therefore difficult in its transla-

tion24. In Wilhelm Heinrich Riehls Land und Leute 25 it condensed the ideolo-

gical battle against the industrial transformation of the country and the

consequent decay of the rural areas.

Paradoxically adopted mainly by a conservative bourgeoisie, it was soon

incorporated in the Heimatschutz-bewegung (Movement for the Protection of

the Heimat)26 a major actor in the debate of the traditional vs. the modern.

Thoroughly experienced space [Schwarz wrote in 1943], space fulfilled and satiated with sim-

ple and heart-warm human lives. Space which was there before as a natural landscape and then

became gradually human living space: Heimat is a historical fact created by the people little by

little out of the preexistent material of nature27.

The ancestral landscape, seen in its metaphysical capacity to nurture ideo-

logical constructs about communitarian unity and the sense of belonging to

place, became the raw material of the new urban configuration 28.

Panos Mantziaras

20

24. Heimat comes from the middlegerman hei-moute where is found the indoeuropeankei,designating the place where one gets established,lives and is recognised by his fellow people. It alsois related to the German Kei (word for settle-ment), the Greek (hamlet) and the gothichaims. Kei is also to be found in the GermanHeirat (wedding) in the adjective geheuer(familiar) and, above all, in Heim (home). There isa sentimental value attached to this term, whichis not any more to be found in Siedeln andSiedlung. Cf. Hartmut Frank, Nostalgie et tradi-tion dans l'habitation allemande des annes 20 et30. La mise en scne de la Heimat, In Extenso,Recherches l'Ecole d'Architecture de Paris-

Villemin, n. 9, p. 114.25. RIEHL, Wilhelm Heinrich, Land und Leute,Gottascher Verlag, Stuttgart, 1881.26. The term was coined in 1880 by Ernst Rudoff27. Stadtlandschaft Diedenhofen, p. 10a.28. In this sense Schwarz was apparently reachingthe limits of the regimes tolerance as to the sym-bolic meaning of the landscape; cf. Karl Ditt, Theperception and conservation of nature in theThird Reich, Planning Perspectives, vol. 2, year15, April 2000, pp. 161-187.

Rudolf Schwarz, plan of Bollingen,Lorraine, 1941-1942.


7/22


8/22

The same principles were entirely adapted in the Cologne project after the

war. Obviously, the centre of gravity moved from the construction of an ethni-

cally pure citylandscape to that of a reconstruction of a major historic urban

centre and the ordering of its parts in a new spatial entity. Interestingly enough,

Schwarz related the post-war pessimistic feeling in front of the ruins and the

idea of urban dissolution, within the sense of end of a culture36.

The battle against the big city has become a widespread solution. The idea of the disintegra-

tion of the Grossstadt resounds like a fanfare. It resounds in a time that seems to prove the

thought of the decline of the West with this strange mixture of curiosity and resignation,

which are often seen as symptoms of sickness, and its echo is simultaneously a confirmation of

the theory of the downward movement of a culture whose incarnation is the big city 37.

It was in fact in the same year that Romano Guardini had published a book

with the very evocative title Das Ende der Neuzeit (The End of Modernity)

with the support of the Deutscher Werkbund circles and with a vain wish for

return to a cosmological order from where the modern man seemed to have

mistakenly escaped38. The parallel reflection and mutual influence of the archi-

tect and the priest apparently enhanced the cultural aura of the Stadtlandschaft.

The theme of the reconstruction, that is, far from being a mere technical ques-

tion, had set in Schwarzs eyes the problem of the revitalisation of a national

culture, whose heyday were supposed to be the Middle Ages.

One feels like a soldier placed at the last position of defense [Schwarz wrote during this period

to Mies van der Rohe], and one shouldnt wonder if it can still be held. It may sound a bit odd,

but I have the determination to hold this position or to fall for it, because I feel my existence

identified with that of the West, as old-fashioned as all that may be. We must rapidly mobilize

all our remaining forces, and let glow in this world (which becomes so small) the last glimmer

Panos Mantziaras

22

36. Obviously Schwarz had read OswaldSpenglers Decline of the West, but his discourseseems closely related to that of Hans Sedlmayrs

Verlust der Mitte: die bildende Kunst des 19. und20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol derZeit, Otto Mller Verlag, Salzburg, 1948.37. Das neue Kln, p. 15.38. GUARDINI, Romano, Das Ende der Neuzeit: ein

Versuch zur Orien tierung , Werkbu nd Verlag,Wrzburg, 1950.

Ernst May, Plan for the extension ofBreslau, 1923.


9/22

of the ancient light, so that the old peoples may see once more what they were meant to be and

take this recollection with them in what is to come39.

This voluntarily retrogarde position, however firm and conscious might it

be, did not hinder Schwarz from producing a complex and multifaceted project.

As he put it40

in the Conference on the Reconstruction that took place inCologne in 1947, four principles should be established:

- Regulation of the throughtraffic in order to give it a recognisable form

and protect the centre from its nuisances, so that the crisis of the land-

scape gets transformed into a human and historical, that is spiritual,

form.

- Restoration of peace and silence in the old city that, relieved of the

technique and its movement, could become again the cradle of won-

derful and rare things.

- Establishment of a new autonomy and value for the suburbs and thus

creation of new opportunities for their participation in the metropolitan

economic and social life.

- Consideration of the whole Cologne bay as a unified landscape, coher-

ent in every way, able to bear the big city and guide its development.

The difference in scale between Thionville and Cologne and the new so-

cioeconomic factors required a critical and innovative approach, which led

Schwarz to conceive a double Cologne. A Nordstadt, situated between

Merheim and Merkenich, near Leverkhusen, that would concentrate industry

and 350 000 workers, thus constituting a Milky Way (Milchstrae) as he

qualifies it. However, it would not be a city per se; no important central func-

tions should be installed in this northern part of the Cologne region. These

should be concentrated in the old reconstructed and revived centre at the south

the old Cologne more apt to host nobler activities (administration, edu-

cation and cult) in a peaceful atmosphere consecrated by the aura of the past.

Schwarz thus proposed a new kind of zoning, as an alternative to the one

established by the Athens charter, based no more on the functional analysis of

the city, but on the historicalontological consideration of its permanent featu-res. Four powers (Gewalten), or dominant elements, should always be pre-

sent in the urban realm sovereignty, education, cult and economy each one

coming to the foreground in its turn, following the change of social and histo-

rical conditions. New positions, new morals, new ways of life would then

follow that, however, would never thoroughly cancel the remaining three.

They would stay valid, waiting in the background for the right moment to

be reactivated and gain priority in urban life.

The concept of these four elements (Werdewrter words of values, as

Schwarz also called them), in conjunction to the model of Stadtlandschaft and

its inherent critique to centrality, led him to imagine a series of alternating

centres. An obvious undermining of the graph of an inverted tree, image of

the spatial and social relations in a centralised city, which had to cede its placeto a topologically more complex one, the most suitable way to give public

face and esteem to the indifferent peripheral districts. In the case of Cologne,

Lindenthal would keep hosting the University, Deutz would become the exhi-

bitions area, the sports field would get installed in Mngersdorf etc 41.


23

39. Letter to Mies van der Rohe, 21.5.1947,Schwarz Archives, Cologne.40. Grundfragen des Aufbaus, op. cit., p. 31.41. Passim., pp. 21-24.

Rudolf Schwarz, conceptual scheme for adouble Cologne, 1951.

Schwarz, scheme representing the idea ofalternating centres for Thionville, 1943.

Rudolf Schwarz, the concept of the Whole

and of its four constitutive elements, 1949.


10/22

What is innovative in Schwarz's attitude, is not so much the practice of dis-

tributing central functions in the periphery, something already proposed by

Christaller and Lsch42. It is, rather, the assumption that these functions render

the individual quarters visible parts of a whole, whereas totality survives in its

parts, in total accordance with the spirituality of the romantic idea of the frag-

ment of the neoplatonic heritage of the Catholic Reform Movement.

Moreover, the constant readaptation and relocalisation of this centrality

led to the idea of elastic planning (elastische Planung), as the author quali-

fied it. Planning, he said, should avoid fixing a definite urban form. It should

rather propose an urban configuration, a Gestalt43. He thus returned to the

German debate of the 1920s and to Fritz Schumachers writings on a desired

image Wunschbild44. At the same time, he evidently related to the Gestalt the-

ory focusing on structural principles discernible by the human cognition. He

suggested that this approach might permit an open planning, that would allow

for a variety of urban forms, keeping always close to a basic organisational

structure.

CITY-LANDSCAPE: THE GENESIS OF A TERM

Rudolf Schwarz was not the first to use the term Stadtlandschaft. It appe-

ared in the geographical debate of the early 20th century, within the debate on

the economic relation of the city to its respective territory. A debate which goes

back to the beginning of the 19th century, marked by Fichtes postulate that a

nation may and should thrive enclosed in itself45. Upon this philosophical pre-

mise, the economist Johann Heinrich von Thnen built his study on the eco-

nomic relation of the city to its immediate territory, within the model of an

isolated state. His abstract scheme of a city in the centre of a series of con-

centric circles representing its immediate economic region divided in speciali-

sed production areas remains until today a fundamental in economic theory 46.

Complementary considerations with a higher degree of complexity appeared

just two decades later, in the geographer Johann Georg Kohls arborescent dia-

grams of agglomerations and route systems, expressing the assumption thattransportation networks and urban centres functioned as vital organs of a

region47.

The connection of the economic function of an inhabited region to its

natural and human characteristics received further attention in the early

20th century, through the geographers Max Eckert48 use of the term econo-

mic landscape (Wirtschaftslandschaft): a geographic entity with strong eco-

nomic integrity and socio-cultural identity, the city and its region being a

particular type of such a landscape49. In the beginning of the 1920s, Eckert

made an extensive use of the term Stadtlandschaft in his description German

towns50 and it is in the beginning of the 1930s, that his colleague Siegfried

Passarge published Die Stadtlandschaften der Erde where the relation of an

urban society to its natural basis was extensively presented51. He thus descri-

bed the unitary aspect of the German urban formations, where human cons-truction and natural elements seem to merge harmoniously manner. He

presented urbanised landscapes as artificial formations where natural forces

had only sporadic and temporary impact. Contrary to this, he wrote, it was arti-

ficial human constructs, created by economy and technique, like the transport

Panos Mantziaras

24

42. CHRISTALLER, Walter, Die zentrale Orte inSddeutschland, Fischer Verlag, Jena, 1933 ; Aus-gust Lsch, Die rumliche Ordnung derWirtschaft, Fischer, Iena, 1940 ; KlausGreve/Gnter Heinritz, Zentrale Orte imHerzogtum Schleswig 1860, Karl Wachholtz

Verlag, Neumnster, 1987.43. SCHWARZ, Das neue Kln, op. cit., p. 24.44. See also Rapports de la ConfrenceInternationale de l'amnagement des Villes, Am-sterdam, Amsterdam, 1924. This term, whichactually means desired/ideal image marks alsothe end of a formalist approach to the city outli-ne, in favour of an abstract spirit of organisation.The termwill later be used by Martin Wagner inthe case of Berlin, to underline his distanciationfrom formal considerations; cf. Ludovica Scarpa,Berlin, annes vingt, une gestion active de laville: Martin Wagner, in: Cahiers de la recherchearchitecturale, n. 15/16/17, 1985, p. 92.45. Cf. KELLY, George A., (ed.), Thirteenth

Address, in: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Adresses tothe German Nation, Harper Torch Books, NewYork, 1968.46. VON THNEN, Johann Heinrich, Der isolierteStaat (1826-1863), Verlag von Wiegandt, Hempel& Varen, Berlin, 1875.47. KOHL, Johann Georg, Der Verkehr und dieAnsiedelungen der Menschen in ihrer Abhngig-keit der Gestaltung der Erdoberflche, ArnoldscheBuchhandlung, Dresde/Leipzig, 184148. ECKERT, Max, (1868-1938), is the inventor ofthe geographical projection Eckert IV.49. Jede Stadt bildete mit ihrer engeren oder wei-teren Umgebung eine einzigeWirtschaftslandschaft; Max Eckert, Grundriss derHandelsgeographie, G. J. Gschensche

Verlagshandlung, Leipzig, 1905, pp. 190.50. Cf. ECKERT, Max, Die Kartenwissenschaft.Forschungen und Grundlagen zur einer Kar-tographie als Wissenschaft, W. de Gruyter, Berlin,1921.51. PASSARGE, Siegfried, (ed.), Stadtlandschaftender Erde, Friederischen/De Gruyter & Co.,Hambourg, 1930. Cf. also of the same author DieLandschaftsgrtel der Erde, Natur und Kultur, F.Hirt, Breslau, 1923. Passarge (1867-1958) is theauthor of two of the earliest ethnographic mono-graphies, in the early 20th century, based onMalinowskis method of participant observation,

Johann Heinrich von Thnen, scheme illus-trating the concept of the Isolated State,1825.


11/22

networks, that proved to be durable entities. Passarge signified in this way also

a cultural landscape (Kulturlandschaft) created in a particularly autonomous

way, via human establishment52.

The geographic approach of the 1920s was paired by visions on the dis-

solution of the cities in the landscape, such as those by Bruno Taut, who pre-sented in a series of birds eye views in distances from 300 to 15000 metres 53

loose urban configurations in forms of daisies with no trace of conventional

city in sight. Those years Martin Wagner had published his thesis on the hygie-

nic importance of green spaces in the big cities, with a very evocative diagram

indicating a high degree of penetration of nature to the urban mass 54. In the

1920s Walter Schwagenscheidt attempted to promote his concept of a

Raumstadt, according to which the urban mass should be divided in districts of

25000 inhabitants55.

Openly, these planners pleas against the Grostadt were directed rather

against density and disorder than against urban culture per se. This particula-

rity should be pointed out, just to argue that any antiurban planning projects

should be carefully examined as to their social vision, in order to be claimed

as such; that spatial concepts cannot inform about the degree of their antiur-banity56. Indicatively, Taut published in the late 1920s, a comparison of Berlin

with other capitals, arguing that productive forces, in particular of cultural

type, were most clearly recognisable at the suburbs 57. It is one of those cases

where the ideal of low density in a dispersed city is paired to the vision of

modernist culture accessed by loosely settled urbanites. In this sense Tauts

vision of dissolution differs from other spatially similar concepts where the

main argument is that of the reconstruction of the community of souls and

of the Heimat, thus directly referring to clichs about a premodern harmony of

the cosmos58. The connection of the urban masses to nature, source of vital

products and health (whose absence from the urban realm could prove fatal, as

the 1929 economic crisis had shown) was charged with particular ideological

significance by the city administrators. And it is in those very circles of the

Berlin and Frankfurt planning administrations that the city-landscape seems to

have taken its visionary trait, just before the seize of power by the nationalso-cialist party and the subsequent integration of the term in the ideological cons-

truct of the national-socialist city.

In fact, a very interesting event took place in April 1932: the review Das

neue Frankfurt directed by Ernst May until his departure with his brigade for

Soviet Union in Autumn 1930 was renamed after the more generic Die

neue Stadt (The New City). Although it remained the official organ of the

Association Das neue Frankfurt, its new profile obviously pertained to the

critical discussion of the time, that of the being and the evolution of the big

city. And, interestingly enough, the editors note in the first number started

with a question: Ende der Grostadt? (End of the metropolis?) The authors

sense of witnessing a secular restructuring affecting modern life, and the

inevitable connection between art and technique, was for him to be summari-

zed in town-planning and its corollary, regional planning.

The birds eye perspective illustration of D. H. McMorrans entry to the

competition for the new London Airport was escorted by the following words:

Flughfen neueste Ansatzpunkte der Auflsung (Aiports the newest


25

and shed light to questions of power structures,ethnic groups and land control. He advocated amonophyletic history of human evolution andaccepted the Darwinian synthesis of the unitarydescent of man, then being constructed by anth-ropologists and biologists. Later, Passarge made amore precise use of it, in order to describe thephysiognomy of the materially perceptible surfa-ce of the earth. Cf. Siegfried Passarge, Einfhrungin die Landschaft, B. G. Teubner, Leipzig/Berlin,1933.52. DURTH/GUTSCHOW, p. 190.53. TAUT, Bruno, Die Auflsung der Stdte oderDie Erde eine gute Wohnung oder auch: Der Weg

zur Alpinen Architektur, Folkwang Verlag, Hagen,1920.54. WAGNER, Martin, Das Sanitre Grn derStdte, Ein Beitrag zur Freiflchentheorie, CarlHermann, Berlin, 1915.55. Cf. SCHWAGENSCHEIDT, Walter, DieRaumstadt, Verlag Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg,1949; interestingly enough, Schwarzs Von derBebauung der Erde was appeared the same yearby the same publisher.56. Manfredo Tafuri distinguished a regressiveideology and a nostalgic utopia that wasexpressed in a distinct way by all forms of antiur-ban thought, by Tnniess sociology and by aneffort to confront the new commercial reality ofthe metropolis to ideas about restoration of com-munal or anarchist mythologies; cf. ManfredoTafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth, Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the1970s (La sfera e il labirinto, 1980) MIT Press,Cambridge (MA)/London, 1990, p. 17. FrancescoDal Co also used the name in order to describe thecommunitarian tradition combined with elementsof popular ideology as being in the basis of thegardecity concept in Germany; cf. Francesco DalCo, Figures of Architecture and Thought, GermanArchitecture Culture, 1880-1920, Rizzoli, NewYork, 1990, p. 56. Giorgio Ciucci considersWrights Broadacre City as a an antiurban para-

Johann Georg Kohl, schemes illustratingthe territorial organisation of cities, 1948.


12/22

signs of sprawl)59. Obviously a moment of higher to the state of the art

accomplishment was expected to be achieved, in the interaction of the city to

the region, namely through urban sprawl.

The following number of the review contained an extensive reference to

Berlin, where Martin Wagner apparently responded by his article Sterbende

Stdte! Oder Planwirtschaftlicher Stdtebau? (Dying cities! Or town planning

in a planned economy?) With cynical lucidity Wagner noted that it is in fact the

economical liberalism that rendered whole cities or parts of them dead,

migratory phenomena being related to production costs. He thus resumed to

the task of an organic rearrangement of the metropolis in order to create

more attractive residential ambiances60

.

And it is in the same volume, where a short note by the editor Joseph

Gantner entitled Stadtlandschaft Berlin offered a very early use of the term

not as describing a fact but as anticipating a future, prototypical condition. The

note suggested a new term for the urban non-form of Berlin, as opposed to

Paris and London:

In Berlin now the result is called city-landscape [Stadtlandschaft]; an almost smooth, as if it

was created by itself, inclusion of the countryside in the everyday life of the city, a natural gro-

wing out of the city into the countryside. And perhaps a quite new sort of modern metropolitan

formation comes into being, for which Berlin becomes the prototype61.

It seems that this is the very historical moment that the city-landscape

was transformed from an analytical to a projectual term, rendering a concep-tual allure to urban sprawl that pervaded in the post-war years up until the

1990s62. In the very same number of Die neue Stadt, a short note on the

Diskussion um die Stadtrandsiedlung (Discussion on the peripheral resi-

dence) and on Leberecht Migges book Die wachsende Siedlung63, that had

Panos Mantziaras

26

digm, too; Giorgio Ciucci, The City in AgrarianIdeology and Frank Lloyd Wright: Origins andDevelopment of Broadacres, in : The AmericanCity, pp. 295-296 and 332. Andrew Lees perceived

a part of the German intellectuals as antiurbanconservatives, in that they proposed a return tothe state of selfsufficiency incarnated in the com-munitarian structures of an agrarian society, as aremedy to the urban misery and ugliness.Contrary to this attitude, Hartmut Frank proposedthe term of reform as more adequate to theattitude of the German bourgeoisie in the begin-ning of the 20th century; cf. Heimatschutz undtypologisches Entwerfen. Von der Erhaltung derTradition zur Erfindung von HeimatModernisierung und Lokaltradition beimWiederaufbau von Ostpreuen, 1915-1927;Hartmut Frank (ed.) Fritz Schumacher, Reformkul-tur und Moderne, Hatje, Stuttgart, 1994;Faschistische Architekturen, Planen und Bauen inEuropa, 1930 bis 1945, Hans Christians Verlag,Hambourg, 1985.57. TAUT, Bruno, Via LondonParisNew YorkNeuBerlin, in: Martin Wagner (ed.), Das neueBerlin, Grossstadtprobleme, Deutsche Bauzeitung,1929, p. 30.

58. On this particularly fertile comparison betwe-en an harmonious closed cosmos and an opendynamic universe, cf. Alexandre Koyr, Du mondeclos lunivers infini, Gallimard, Paris, 1973, basedon studies by Etienne Gilson of the 1920s thatwere very well known in the German Catholic cir-cles.59. Cf. GANTNER, Joseph, Ende der Grostadt,Die neue Stadt, 1, April 1932, pp. 2-4.60. Cf. WAGNER, Martin, Sterbende Stdte! OderPlanwirtschftlicher Stdtebau?, Die neue Stadt, 2,May 1932, pp. 50-59.61. GANTNER, Joseph, Stadtlandschaft Berlin,Die neue Stadt, 2, May 1932, p. 65.62. Cf. among others, William HollingsworthWhyte (dir.), The Exploding Metropolis, Doubleday,Garden City(NY), 1958; Melvin Webber, The UrbanPlace and the Nonplace Urban Realm, 1964;Interestingly enough, the conceptual value ofurban sprawl regained a conceptual potential inthe 1990s; cf. among others Rem Koolhaas, LaGrande Ville et ses Priphries (interview with

Bruno Fortier), L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, n262, 1989, pp. 90- 91; Robert Fishman, Space,Time and Sprawl, Architectural Design, mars-avril 1994, pp. 45-47.63. Leberecht Migge, Die wachsende Siedlungnach biologischen Gesetzen, Francksche Ver-lagsbuchhandlung, Stuttgart, 1932.64. SCHROEDER, G., Diskussion um dieStadtrandsiedlung, Die neue Stadt, 2, May 1932,p. 68.65. WAGNER, Martin, Nachwort, in: MartinWagner (dir.), Das wachsende Haus, Deutsches

Verlagshaus Bong & Co., Berlin/Leipzig, 1932, p.41 (underlined by M. Wagner); cf. also MartinWagner, Das neue Berlin, Die neue Stadt, 6/7, pp.144-145.66. WAGNER, Martin, Nachwort, in: MartinWagner (dir.), Das wachsende Haus, Deutsches

Verlagshaus Bong & Co., Berlin/Leipzig, 1932, p.42.67. Cf. HEGEMANN, Werner, Der Stdtebau nachden Ergebnissen der Stdtebau-Ausstellungen inBerlin und Dsseldorf, 1910-1912, ErnstWasmuth, Berlin, 1913.68. Cf. for example Rudolf Eberstadt/BrunoMhring/Petersen., Gro-Berlin, ein Programmfr die Planung der neuzeitlichen Grostadt, ErnstWasmuth, Berlin, 1910.69. SCHWARZ, Rudolf, Das neue Kln, p. 11.

Max Eckert, a German City-landscape, 1905.


13/22

appeared in the same year, permits the association of an alternative construc-

tive philosophy to a new culture of human establishment:

In the same way that once people were migrating to the city, now they return to the countrysi-

de, and the former ideal of the city culture is confronted to the new ideal of the city-countrysi-

de [Stadt-Land] culture64.

That same year though, Martin Wagner had published a book with the very

similar title Das wachsende Haus. It included projects by a number of impor-

tant architects of the Neues Bauen Migge included on the theme of the gar-

den house, conceived as a living and expanding unit. Wagners textual

contribution to the book (dated May 1932), while playing on a number of dia-

lectical antitheses (spiritual vs. biological roots, social vs. economic bonds of

the population to the city, dominant vs. servant role of the machine, etc.) ends

up with a suggestion to overpass the most symbolic and allencompassing of

them all, namely the city-land contrast:

If the machine is the city and nature the country, then we shall make the city dependant on the

country and shall build a new city-country [Stadt-Land] on the old ground of the city65.

In this way, a new human was supposed to come to being, equally related

to the urban and to the rural environment, the Stadtlandmensch66. The hypot-

hesis of a dialectic resolution of the antithesis city-country, propagated by

Ebenezer Howard, was here taken one step further: the new human being

would be the only resident in a loosely inhabited land.

The new vision was enabled by the larger scale of observation that was

offered by the regional planning approach, especially from the Gross-Berlin

Competition in 191067 and onwards, where urban problems were directly rela-

ted to those of the rural areas and the Bodenreform, and where the planners

themselves attempted through abstract graphs of the territory to propose large

scale conceptualisations of the urban formation68.

Was this apparent resolution of antitheses, pursued since the late 19th cen-tury, a preamble to Rudolf Schwarzs redoubled man (verdoppelter Mensch)

that would lead his reflection in the city-landscape of Cologne? If Wagner had

in mind the dissolution of the urban mass and of its correlated power and

wealth, Schwarz aimed, through the same city-landscape paradigm, at the cri-

tique of the Technique as part of the cultural reformatory stance of the Catholic

Youth Movement. He remarked that with the eruption of the new traffic con-

ditions in the cities, the human being is obliged to deal with forces far beyond

his immediate corporeal capabilities. A new multiplied human being is born,

multiplied by the force of the technique.

But this old type of human being continues to exist and believes that the future belongs to him

too. The mechanised man leaves his vehicle somewhere and suddenly he is not any more in a

haste. He has infinitely lots of time and vacations, and the old high things are still precious to

him. He still loves going the sluggish way through winding alleys, he does not think of renoun-

cing the donkey's ways of his ancestors according to Le Corbusiers demand, and finds him-self gladly in museums and churches. He has still his old preferences and needs them together

with the new ones, that are not always pressing. The human being is doubled. As a user of tech-

nology one makes uses of big speeds and spaces. As an employee of corporate structures one

works in scyscrapers. But, when one leaves the technical construct, one becomes a single per-

son again, one who feels at home in the human scale 69.


27

Bruno Taut, drawing from Die Auflsungder Stdte, oder Die Erde eine guteWohnung, 1919.

Martin Wagner, scheme illustrating thepenetration of nature into the city fromDer sanitre Grn der Stdte, 1915.

Walter Schwagenscheidt, scheme from his

project Die Raumstadt, 1923.


14/22

The obvious parallels were further strengthened in July 1932, in Die neue

Stadt, by a preview of Karl Schefflers Der neue Mensch, a book that appeared

in 193370. The reminder of Schefflers vision of the city as an association of

townships around a common vital point (Lebenskern) 71 comes in accord with

the organic argument of the times. It is even more so, if one considers Martin

Wagners postulation on a viable size of agglomeration that he estimates up to

50.000 inhabitants.

Our 'Fnfziger' is no city and no countryside. It is a 'city-country'! It is the countryside-stres-

sed city and the city-stressed countryside! This city-country stretches like a big long village as

a 'linear city' through the countryside. Only, it has nothing more in common with the 'village',

nothing external and nothing internal! The village street is a traffic space which offers to the car

(and only the car) three lanes for three different speeds in every direction 72.

Wagners concern obviously was Berlin, and advanced mechanisation was

apparently an exclusive option for its future. However, unlike the disurbanist

avantgarde and its linear concepts that brought to the extremes the spatial

urban inventiveness73, the organic ideal remained in the German planners

stash even in their Russian projects as Walter Schwagenscheidts concept of

Quartals allows to presume [Schwagenscheidt: Quartals].

Indeed, the Russian doll effect of his concept in the organisation of the

industrial city in clusters contained in always larger ones, each one of them

offering adequate public facilities in its core, is much closer to the biological

cellular analogy, than to the industrial/serial one74.

As if the pressing postcrash conditions and the heightening of tensions inthe German society with the national-socialist party closer than ever to power,

were urging intellectuals and planners to look deep into the structure of the

individual and of the city with a hope of remedy simultaneously a political

and an urban one

Panos Mantziaras

28

70. SCHEFFLER, Karl, Der neue Mensch, InselVerlag, Leipzig, 1933.71. Cf. SCHEFFLER, Karl, Die Architektur derGrostadt, Bruno Cassirer Verlag, Berlin, 1913.72. WAGNER, Martin, Stdtebau als Wirtschafts-bau und Lebensbau, Die neue Stadt, 8, November1932, p. 178.73. Cf. among others, Nikolai AleksandrovichMiliutin, Sotsgorod, Gos.izdvo, Moscow, 1930;english edition, Sotsgorod: the Problem ofBuilding Socialist Cities, MIT Press, Cam-bridge(MA), 1974.74. Cf. HOPMANN, Ernst, Stdtebau in derU.d.S.S.R., Die Form, vol. 5, year VII, 1932.;Burghard Preusler, Walter Schwagenscheidt,1886-1968, Architektenideale im Wandel sozialerFigurationen, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart,1985.

Hermann Jansen, proposal for the

Grosssberlin, 1910.


15/22

THE CITY-LANDSCAPE AS PROJECT

How to negotiate the organic paradigm with the mechanic one? How tocompromise a century-old philosophical tradition turning around the relation

to the earth, as Novalis and the Romantic Movement had imagined it, and a

new condition of precision, normalisation and repetition, that the industrial

imperative had set up? Rudolf Schwarz had a thoughtful approach on this cul-

tural dichotomy in his Wegweisung der Techni, by opposing the preindustrial

Innerlichkeit (intimate, inner condition) to the modern Bezogenheit (relational,

open condition). His project to unite the two in a new conceptual scheme,

where harmony is to be found in the modern tension, had certainly made him

known to some circles, and influenced people like Mies van der Rohe, whom

he had met in 1925 in Berlin75. It is therefore not a surprise to find the two

architects in working sessions with Martin Wagner in the beginning of the

1930s76 that introduced Schwarz more specifically to concepts about the

fusion of the city with the countryside. The debate proved to be directly adap-

table to his critique on the Technique, the building of the community and theplanning activity.

Great tension and total mobility in an environment without density; new corporeal integrity in

the highest isolation; dynamism and cohesion in the serial law; system of order in a brand new

collaboration based on the balance (equally realised in the pieces of a machine): it is out of

there that escapes a sudden, discontinuous and yet orderly coexistence, which is the apparent

chaotic mixture of time and the internal and discordant life; and also facts like the transforma-

tion of the big cities in circulation nodes (and this means, indeed, their transformation according

to the image of a machine which is big, but whose conception is horribly simple): all this and

many other things seem to announce the irruption of a new universal configuration

[Weltgestalt]77.

Such an acute and anticipatory critique to the technique had certainly pro-

vided the young Schwarz with an intellectual capacity to integrate the city-

landscape concept and orient it towards his favourite thematic, that of theprotection and exaltation of the noble. Schwarz had inherited this attitude

from his years in the Quickborn, where the idea of a neuer Adel und

Ritterlichket, was set by Guardini as a motto for the reconstitution of a spiri-

tual and cultural-political offensive of the long repressed German Catholic


29

75. The editor of the review Die Form WalterRiezler considered it to be one of the most impor-tant contributions to the theme of the Technique,comparable to Friedrich Dessauers Philosophieder Technik (Verlag Friedrich Cohen, Bonn, 1926)and Oswald Spenglers Der Mensch und dieTechnik: Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens(C. H. Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich,1931); cf. Walter Riezler, Drei Bcher berTechnik, Die Form, year 6, November 1931. Miesvan der Rohe had a copy of the original editionthat he had meticulously read and underlined.76. Cf. Pehnt, op. cit., pp. 77-79.77. Ulrich Conrads, Rudolf Schwarz: Wegweisungder Technik op. cit. pp. 72-73.

Gottfried Feder, Krystallogram for the newcity, 1938.


16/22

element. Within this momentum, Schwarz had qualified the Schildgenossen as

a Hochland (Highland), a forum for a cultural debate on the important issues

of modernity. It is therefore a surprise to have him exclaim in the 1940s:

The big city is dead, long live the city-landscape a great town planner had once said, and we

add to this Long live the High City, the noble centre, where the entire landscape gets concen-

trated on higher domains78.

By this quotation, Schwarz referred time and again to Martin Wagners

Stadtlandschaft79. One may assume with a great deal of certainty that his

reference was not a mediatic outcry. In fact, Schwarzs approval of Wagners

claim for the disappearing of the metropolitan industrial centres was artfully

giving way to the reintroduction of the traditional town core as a symbol of

communal coherence, under the aureole of religious cult.

But before Schwarz was able to experiment on it, the term was already

introduced in the official town planning circles. Indeed, the concept seemed toembrace in the most adequate way the critique to the Metropolis and the ideo-

logical danger it represented for the established political things, which appea-

red in Germany since the mid-19th century80. The context gave birth to

Gottfried Feders Die neue Stadt81 repeating the title of the Frankfurt review

and somehow adopting Martin Wagners arguments on the size of the ideal city,

that Feder defined it to 20000 inhabitants. The novelty is to be found in the par-

ticular concern for political control over the population, which was largely

facilitated by the strategy of fragmentation of the urban mass into Zellen,

Siedlungen, Nachbarschaften, etc. In fact, the whole argument on the recons-

titution of the scale of the community was flirting with idea of a reconstitu-

tion of a low middle class, reincarnation of the artisanal world of the Middle

Ages that was still hounting the collective conscience as the national past par

excellence82. And exactly this class of artisans, petits bourgeois, farmers and

peasants was supposed to have their habitat in the very praised Kleinstadt83.

The tendency to revive the small town, and the obvious administrative

advantages of it paradoxically or perhaps not led to a readaptation of

Schwagenscheidts Quartals and to its combination to Walter Christallers cen-

Panos Mantziaras

30

78. Stadtlandschaft Diedenhofen, loc. cit., Dasdritte Kln (1949), Schwarz Archives, Cologne;Das neue Kln, op. cit., pp.79. A distance that however didnt prevent MartinWagner from estimating the creative solitute inwhich his by 42 years younger colleague hadenshrined himself; cf. Pehnt, op. cit., p. 99, note418.80. Cf. among others Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, DieNaturgeschichte des Deutschen Volkes, PhilippReclam Verlag, Leipzig, 1851-1869; TheodorFritsch, Handbuch der Judenfrage, Hammer

Verlag, Leipzig, 1943 (first published in 1887), andDie Stadt der Zukunft, 1896; Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten, Callwey imKunstwart-Verlag, Munich, 1909, vol. IV.81. Gottfried Feder, Die neue Stadt, Versuch derBegrndung einer neuen Stadtplanungskunst ausder sozialen Struktur der Bevlkerung, Verlag vonJulius Springer, Berlin, 1939.82. Cf. LADD, Brian, Urban Planning and CivicOrder in Germany, 1860-1914, Harvard UniversityPress, Cambridge (MA)/London, 1990; Shulamit

Volkov, The Rise of Popular Antimodernism inGermany : The Urban Master Artisans, 1873-1896,Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1978; DorisMendlewitsch, Volk und Heil, Vordenker desNationalsozialismus im 19. Jahrhundert, Daedalus

Verlag, Rheda-Wiedenbrck, 1988.83. For an idea of how the small town was per-ceived inthese times, cf. Heinrich Tessenow,Handwerk und Kleinstadt, Bruno Cassirer, Berlin,1919.84. CULEMANN, Karl, Die Gestaltung der stdtis-chen Siedlungsmasse, Raumforschung undRaumordnung, vol. 3/4, anne V, 1941; Aufbauund Gliederung gebietlicher Bereiche als Aufgaberumlicher Gestaltung, Ein Beitrag zur Frage derzentralen Orte, Raumforschung undRaumordnung, vol. 8/9, anne VI, 1942, pp. 249-256.

Gottfried Feder, schematic illustration ofthe nucleus of the new city, 1938.


17/22

tral places theory, in a way that parts of cities and entire cities could be consi-

dered the result of a basic Grundschema, repeated in all scales. The method is

briefly but eloquently described by the planner Karl Culemann, in the review

Raumforschung und Raumordnung, in 194184. Groups of 8-15 houses, them-

selves grouped by fours form blocks; 4-8 blocks form cells, and 3-10 of these

cells form administrative units; a group of them creates circles, whose combi-nation gives a county; consecutive consolidations may finally create urban

agglomerations of up to 20000 inhabitants, what Culemann calls the

Normalstadt, in accordance with Feders doctrine. A diagram of the whole

county and of its capital with 200 000 inhabitants, illustrates one of the most

rigorous, quasi-totalitarian representation of cities.

Although Culemann was expressing a more or less official line, Schwarz

commented against his approach in Stadtlandschaft Diedenhofen, while

taking under consideration the gradual sizing of the urban clusters as

Culemann and Schwagenscheidt had done in the past. In fact, this seemed to

allow for a direct correspondence of the partisan structure to urban space,

which was considered an indicator of organic quality. Such were the prero-

gatives set by another advocate of the city-landscape, Wilhelm Wortmann,

for whom every Siedlungszelle (agglomeration cell) of the city-landscape gaveto each inhabitant the capacity to perceive his position in the administrative,

political and urban landscape85.

Consequently, Rudolf Schwarz was not alone on the track of the

Stadtlandschaft. He rather interpreted in his own way theories, methods and

planning schemes for major German cities that appear more or less at the same

time. During his work in Cologne, publications like that by Hans Bernhard

Reichow, Organische Baukunst: von der Grossstadt zur Stadtlandschaft

(1948), were already propagating alternative solutions, to the mass, continuous

and condensed urbanization, based on the organic metaphor86.

Reichows schemes ranged from technical-descriptive, to suggestive and

symbolic ones, portraying even images of root and irrigation systems. Reichow

had already applied the city-landscape idea in Stettin in 1939, where he com-bined the linear city concept with a nucleus of central public facilities and a

division of the whole in distinct units87.

Similarly to Reichow, Hans Scharoun, involved in the reconstruction of

Berlin with his Kollektivplan, was seeking through the city-landscape

principle the means to master metropolitan agglomerations; to transform

unclear, scaleless urban areas to readable and measurable units and organise

them in the same way that natural elements compose the landscape. In such a

way, he hoped, the measure would correspond to the sense and the worth of

the parts in the whole. The city-landscape didnt mean for Scharoun the sky-

line of the medieval town, but the combination of the form and raison dtre of

each and every urban element into a complete artistic configuration (Gestalt)88.

Even in the mid-1960s another central figure of the mid-war period plan-ning milieu, Ernst May, published manuals referring to the concept of

Stadtlandschaft. His approach complied in some sense with that of Schwarz, in

that he limited the notion to an area limited by municipal borders, despite the

fact that the symbolic and cultural force of it goes far beyond these borders89.


31

85. WORTMANN, Wilhelm, Der Gedanke derStadtlandschaft, in: Raumforschung undRaumordnung, vol. 1/1941, p. 16.86. As in live nature big masses are biologicallyviable only by division and by blood irrigationuntil their smallest entity, it is so in the organiccity: the processes of life and movement, the traf-fic and roads determine from inside towards out-side the structure and order of the city -landscape. From the mass one arrives at thebody! Hans Bernhard Reichow, OrganischeBaukunst: von der Grossstadt zurStadtlandschaft, Georg Westermann Verlag,Braunschweig/Berlin/Hamburg, 1948. p. 66.87. Cf. DURTH/GUTSCHOW, op. cit., pp. 190-191;cf. aussi Reichow, op. cit.88. Scharoun, op. cit., p. 158.

Karl Culemann, basic pattern for the deve-lopment of new cities, 1941.

Karl Culemann, a Normalstadt of 20000inhabitants, 1941.

Hans Bernhard Reichow, schematic planfor the extension of Stettin, 1939.


18/22

At the same time, he clearly distinguished the city-landscape from the

American sprawl, rejecting the one-family detached house as the constitutive

unit of the territorial city90.

Comparable solutions, based on the same negative analysis of centralized

agglomerations, were exposed by Ludwig Hilberseimer in The New City,published towards the end of Second World War in the United States91, but with

obvious relation to the German debate, as the structure of the book similar

to Reichows and Feders work reveals. In a summary of this book in

German, published in 1963, Hilberseimer envisioned a decentralized

Metropolis (dezentralierte Grostadt), rather than a city-landscape. It is

however more than evident that the constitutive elements of his concept are the

same, as he suggests that cities should assume a more rural character and villa-

ges a more urban one; that, eventually, the landscape might permeate the city,

which might itself become a part of the landscape92.

Hilberseimer certainly found a receptive audience in the USA, already

familiar with the anti-urban mentality93. However, the German debate was

strongly marked by a will to define a readable overall Gestalt that would struc-

ture, in a general and rather abstract symbolic one might say way, the terri-tory, as it is to be understood by the graphic material that abounds in the

archival sources and by the particular style of the texts.

On the other hand, it seems that the Anglo-American debate was far more

centred on practical issues, lacking the speculative philosophical trait and the

conceptual schemes that its German counterpart produced under the influence

of the Gestalt theory and the phenomenological tradition94.

OF THE CULTURE OF THE EARTH

The urban substance has got into a flowing condition, and approaches its utmost limits, those

of the landscape: the entire country is a big city in statu nascendi. City and countryside fade

away and what is there to take place is neither the one nor the other, but a third one, a city which

extends itself in the entire countryside, which is landscape and city at the same time and it is

probable that this phenomenon is bearer of new configuration95.

With these words, to be found in what proved to be his more philosophical

and less exploited theoretical work, Von der Bebauung der Erde, Rudolf

Schwarz accepted and made his own mark in that very fertile and agitated

debate on the new city form.

The book was partly written during Schwarzs detainment in a French mili-

tary prison in 1945-46 and founded on his previous planning experience at

Lorraine, but with an obvious attempt to grasp the essential questions of the

planning discipline within the post-war framework. Its title, with its syntactic

reference to the tradition of treatises, suggests that urban and regional planning

is akin and consubstantiate to the culture of the earth (Bebauung meaning

both building and cultivation). Close to Martin Heidegger's ontology96 andpaying a tribute to Max Schelers fundamental phenomenological thought, the

book proposes also a transhistorical interpretation of the fundamental elements

in the urban realm. Schwarz obstinately opposed the rational argumentation on

the making of the city:

Panos Mantziaras

32

89. Cf. MAY, Ernst, MATTERN, Hermann,Stadtlandschaft, Flurlandschaft, Arbeitsgemeinschaft zur Verbesserung der Agrarstruktur inHessen e. V., Wiesbaden, 1964, p. 7.90. Ibidem, p. 15.91. Cf. HILBERSEIMER, Ludwig, The New City:Principles of Planning, Paul Theobald, Chicago,1944.92. Cf. HILBERSEIMER, Ludwig, Entfaltung einerPlanungsidee, Ullstein, Berlin, 1963, p. 24.93. A posture to be found in critics like LewisMumford and Benton MacKaye urban visions likeFrank Lloyd Wrights Broadacres, or more concre-te applications like those by Clarence Stein andHenry Wright.94. Cf. for example, Abercrombies relatively sim-plistic schemes in Town and Country Planning,Oxford University Press, London/New York/Toronto, 194395. Von der Bebauung der Erde, Verlag op. cit., p.205.

Ludwig Hilberseimer, schematic develop-ment of the new city, 1945.

Rudolf Schwarz, stratification and accu-

mulation of the earth, 1949.

Rudolf Schwarz, the first plan of the prein-dustrial community, 1949.


19/22

If we see planning as a rationalization which intents to regulate and to foresee a life so myste-

rious in its depth, which weaves an unlimited canvas, which is fertile, which unites in shapes

only to dissolve again, then this life will escape these plans or, if it is completely locked in them,

it will suffocate97.

In a continuous, torrential and almost breathless argumentation, lacking

quotations and references, the text reveals the authors antiscientific, specula-tive point of view. However, a few names like Saint Augustin, Meister Eckhart,

Kierkagaard, Bonaventura, Hlderlin and Stefan George, indicate paths of

interpretation that have rarely been followed by the historians of the field,

paths that seem even more alienating when one gets confronted to assertions

such as:

[The planner] has to plan the world and the end of the world and, so in everything and above

all rest with his soul in God98.

It is then not a surprise to see this sense of implacable responsibility resort

in an effort to establish steady and immovable criteria for the culture of the

Earth, from within which everything is born and is rooted 99. In fact,

Schwarz attempts to describe a basic configuration according to which space,

time and the human being are fashioned, not unlike Tauts metaphysical tropein the Stadtkrone100.

With an introduction on the meaning and the historical responsibilities of

this new discipline, called Raumplanung (regional planning) Schwarz pro-

poses in the first part an interpretation of the building paradigm through a

series of metaphorical notions pertaining to geology, topography and topology:

stratification and accumulation, mountain, foliage and venation, field. In the

following chapter he suggests that the conquest of the earth (what he calls

Landnahme), is about the construction of a series of spaces with the smallest

one enclosed into larger ones, always following the same fundamental Gestalt,

according to a universal plan. The third chapter provides an ample analysis of

the four powers, here named land-scapes, delving deeper into the transhisto-

rical qualities of the inhabited Earth.

Schwarz is based on the assumption of the perennial structural and topo-

logical qualities of the Gestalt of an object (its Substantiae) as opposed to the

morphological and therefore, secondary qualities of its Form (its

Aczidentiae)101. With this Nominalist tool at hand, he proposes a diachronic

abstraction of urban history, distinguishing three plans according to which the

city developed. The first plan corresponds to the preindustrial community

space: circular, harmonious, with an immediate daily relation established bet-

ween the peasant and his fields. Its circular configuration corresponds to an

idea of internal harmony and immobility, as argued in the Keplerian cosmolo-

gical paradigms102, whereas its centre accommodates the four landscapes103.

The second plan is the one established by the modern universe. It is the

linear city, dynamic, changing, oriented towards industrial production. Based

on an abstraction of Miliutin's Sotsgorod, Schwarz concludes at a symmetricconfiguration with the residential areas at both sides, bordering green zones

that serve as a protection from industry, which lies in the middle axis 104. Here

however, the only landscape depicted is that of the economy, an eloquent

message that it is an incomplete space that modernity puts in place, a space


33

96. Schwarzs participation in the DarmstadtGesprch, next to Martin Heidegger and JosOrtega y Gasset certainly added to his personalitya phenomenological allure which was rather off-stream in the effervescent postwar Germany; cf.Hans Schwippert (ed.), Darmstdter Gesprch:Mensch und Technik; Erzeugnis-Form-Gebrauch,im Auftrag des Magistrats der Stadt Darmstadtund des Komitees Darmstdter Gesprch, NeueDarmstadter, Darmstadt, 1952.97. Von der Bebauung der Erde, p. 64.98. Ibidem. p. 13.99. Ibidem. p. 11.100. Cf. TAUT, Die Stadtkrone, op. cit., p. 52.

Rudolf Schwarz, the second plan of theindustrial society, 1949.

Rudolf Schwarz, topological transforma-tions of the communal form, 1938.


20/22

where industry and transportation networks create meaningless Gestalten, and

therefore a space asking for a definite arrangement.

Setting up the task of curing the unfinished Gestalt of the modern city,

Schwarz exploits his theoretical background on the construction of the sacred

space, as he had presented it in Vom Bau der Kirche, in 1938. His objective isto establish finitude (purpose) and therefore ontological autonomy to the city

as he had done it in the formation of a new dynamic religious community. In

that case, the circular, closed und immutable configuration was transformed

into a linear, orientated one. The centre of the circle, point of reference and of

symbolic condensation, had become a leading point, external to the commu-

nity, pulling it towards a transcendental end.

Based on the same analogy, Schwarz establishes in Von der Bebauung der

Erde an ingenious parallel between the linear urban configuration and the

scheme of the gothic cathedral. The second plan gets transformed into a vec-

torial scheme, with an entrance corresponding to the place of raw materials,

the central nave corresponding to the production chain transforming matter

into product, and an end corresponding to the High City, institutional, finan-

cial and religious core. This is the third plan, combination of the previous two,tending to amalgamate harmony and tension; or, rather, accommodate tension

in order to create a new harmony, according to Schwarzs Bergsonian referen-

ces105. The final rendering of this fundamental Gestalt, as it appears on the

cover of the book, has the value of a topological graph. It illustrates the rela-

tions of a constellation of urban places, a veritable Milky Way where centrality

is more symbolic than real and where periphery loses its meaning as the enti-

re landscape becomes the basis for a new urbanity106.

The formal imprecision implied in the topological vocation of the city-

landscape scheme is not an accidental result. In fact, at the last chapter of Von

der Bebauung der Erde, Schwarz puts a serious question mark on the seek of

post-war urbanism for precision and total efficiency in forecasting. Not only as

far as the scale of the interventions is concerned, but also because of the fun-

damental estrangement of the human being as to the earth, which left noguarantee for an adequate treatment of the natural resources. Being conscious

and deeply distressed by the irreversibility of urbanisation, he ultimately ple-

ads for spatial reserves to be left open for future development.

The book ends in a pessimistic tone, with Schwarz considering the ten-

dency for a global organisation of the human environment as an undermining

of the historical process:

The more history is accomplished, the heavier it becomes; the more it is formalised, the poo-

rer it becomes in possibilities107.

The principle of the nonplanified (Unplanbare) appears then to be the last

resort for a dynamic future, security exit for the human soul faced with the

tyrannic and irrevocable imposition of human construction that has long cea-sed to serve the community

With his projects in Lorraine and Cologne, Rudolf Schwarz can be consi-

dered both as a very adequate representative of the German thought on urban

Panos Mantziaras

34

101. Properties of the being according to ThomasAquinass De Ente et Essentia, whose fundamen-tal ideas appear especially in SchwarzsWegweisung der Technik without precise cita-tions. In a paradoxical way Schwarz uses both theAristotelian nominalism and the Platonic ideas onthe State.102. Cf. KEPLER, Johannes, Mysterium Cosmo-graphicum, C. H. Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhand-lung, Mnchen, 1938.103. SCHWARZ, Von der Bebauung der Erde, op.cit., pp. 74-83.104. Ibidem., pp. 83-107.105. Cf. CONRADS, Ulrich, op. cit., p. 16; cf. alsothe metaphor of the pendulum in Henri Bergson,Lvolution cratrice, Flix Alcan, Paris, 1907, p.345.106. Von der Bebauung der Erde, pp. 107-110.107. Ibidem., p. 243.


21/22

planning and as sui generis case. On one hand, his work was produced through

the combination of the main concepts and ideas, often contradictory ones, that

marked the process of the birth of the concept of city-landscape (garden city,

satellite city, cellular distribution, Heimat, etc.). On the other hand, he pushed

to the extremes ideas on the meaning of the landscape and on its connection to

the social hierarchy and the technical realm.

The peculiarity of Schwarzs approach is to be found in his method of dea-

ling with the key-notion of order that was trivialized in the history of the town

planning. Certainly, he pursued his activity following the main task of the town

planning, namely the ordering of a chaotic industrial city for the sake of indus-

trial production108 in very concrete circumstances, which ranges him within the

current of urban reform.

Nevertheless, another image of this work is outlined, if one lingers in the

arguments that gradually built up the particular construct of this

Stadtlandschaft. Rudolf Schwarz integrated several elements of the criticism of

the industrial city, with an evident preference in the cultural stakes that the

domination of the industrial city entailed. It was not merely a rhetorical argu-

ment on the disappearance of the compact city, also developed by certain refor-mers who, on the other hand, firmly pursued the cultural model of the active

citizen (Taut, May, Wagner etc.). It was in fact, the city as place of liberation

of the individual caused by its class awareness, which became Schwarz's tar-

get. Some references of admiration on the force of technical time and the gran-

deur of the industrial metropolises can not make up for his preference for the

village and the little town, where community bonds and sentimental values

supposedly prevailed. Means for the restoration of this image of harmony, even

for the industrial workers, would be the organization of new conglomerations

in neighbourhood and the assertion of the symbolic value of the landscape for

the national unification. In this system, supposed to naturalise (Einbrgern)

the whole of the population, everybody should know his position in the social

hieararchy109. Town planning is planning of people (Stadtplanung ist

Volksplanung) Schwarz had affirmed in the case of Cologne. His concept was

not that of a reorganization of the city at the level of the matter, but at that ofits social hierarchies according to the idealist 19th century vision of the medie-

val world: The people himself is a tree (Das Volk ist selber ein Baum) often

repeats the architect to assert the analogy of the city-landscape in a treelike

system of social ranks. Raumplanung was for him the way to indicate to the

man his ordo in the cosmic hierarchy through the restoration of a state of

affairs damaged by the abnormality of the rationalist human mind and by a

reorganization of the human masses according to eternal principles110.

Nevertheless, the tenet of hierarchical organization implicit in the theory

of the central places found in Feders and Culemanns theories, Schwarz was

subtly refined. Schwarz brought unwillingly to surface a forgotten clause in

Christallers book, namely, that the importance of a city is something much

more than just the sum of its economically active citizens or its urban facili-

ties; it is a degree of intensity in urban life that makes it vivid, prosperousand important111. It is this very degree of intensity that Schwarz intented to

achieve by qualifying the traditional core as High City. But if the symbolic

superiority of the centre implies some kind of kinship to the central places

theory, it is the concept of alternating centres that escapes the normative


35

108. As Giorgio Piccinato very adequately remar-ked, in La costruzione dell'urbanistica, Germania1871-1914, Officina Edizioni, Roma, 1977.109. Cf. Von der Bebauung der Erde, pp. 210-211.110. He could thus be considered as one ofmodern traditionalists (traditionalistischeModerne), according to Hartmut Franks introduc-tion to Faschistische Architekturen, HansChristians, Hamburg, 1985.111. Cf. CHRISTALLER, op. cit., Introduction.

Rudolf Schwarz, the third plan: city-lands-cape as a Tausendfer, 1949.

Rudolf Schwarz, the third plan: the city-landscape as a Milky Way, 1949.


22/22

interpretations of the christallerian theory. Centrality for Schwarz was a qua-

lity that should spread out and cover the entirety of the region. He thus trans-

posed on a regional level his observations on the historical development of

Cologne112 that anticipated recent research on the complexity and multicentra-

lity of the medieval urbs113.

Indeed, Rudolf Schwarzs Stadtlandschaft and its graphic representations

as a reticular, non-hierarchical dispersed city precede Christopher Alexanders

critique to the hierarchical tree structures of modern urban planning by almost

two decades114. At the same time, the idea of an unplanned, open realm, pre-

cious reserve for future development, despite or perhaps because of its

metaphysical foundations, suggests perhaps alternative ways of bringing up the

issue of sustainability in the making of the urban.

Panos Mantziaras

36

112. Cf. Das neue Kln, pp. 3-6.113. Cf. HOHENBERG, Paul M., HOLLEN LEES, Lynn,The Making of Urban Europe, 1000-1950, HarvardUniversity Press, Cambridge (MA), 1985.114. Cf. ALEXANDER, Christopher, The City is nota Tree, Architectural Forum 122, April-May 1965.

MANTZIARAS, P._Rudolf Schwarz and the concept of 'City-Landscape'

Documents

Transcript of MANTZIARAS, P._Rudolf Schwarz and the concept of 'City-Landscape'